Choosing vendors is often one of the most difficult tasks you have to do as a business owner. Each vendor has different strengths and weaknesses and their ways of working. It’s extremely hard to find the one that’s compatible with your working style and understands your processes. Only then you can forge a relationship that’s smooth and beneficial for both parties.
Not only that, even after choosing the right vendors, you can face many challenges and issues in the communication, process, and other such areas.
To overcome these issues or prevent them from happening altogether, make sure that everyone is on the same page and you are using the right and easy-to-use tools to streamline engagement, communication, your work, customer service, and all the fronts where your vendors are involved. This is when the vendor management system comes into the picture.
You’ll read a lot about what these vendor management tools should be like, what are they, and whatnot, but in this blog post, we are going to cover vendor management best practices to follow in 2020. Practices that will help you to maintain a healthy relationship with your vendors, get the quality work, and on time.
Properly manage vendor supplier contact details
This is the first thing you need to do once you sign a deal with any of the vendors. Make sure to have detailed information about your vendors. Update the same details into your vendor management system. Also, make sure that your vendor portal/management system allows you to create space for your vendors to interact with your organization and assign unique identification numbers.
Both the features will help you to keep track of each and every vendor individually and also track the exchange of communication and transactions.
Evaluate vendor performance
Evaluating your vendors’ performance on a weekly or monthly basis comes in handy while strategizing your business expansion. You can evaluate metrics like their method of working, their quality of work/products, their involvement in your order fulfilling process, and also your customers’ reviews of their products.
Apart from evaluating their work, you should also check their certifications, employees, training, insurances, etc. Also, you can evaluate the transactions happening between you and them — like are they following the deadlines, what are the return rates of their products, etc. You can access all these details from your vendor portal.
Original Source: https://www.crmjetty.com/blog/vendor-management-best-practices/
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